Extreme Pinball

Electronic Arts

Digital pinball games have become quite popular over the last few years
and so it isn't surprising to see them showing up on the Sony PlayStation.
Electronic Arts has supplied gamers with a pinball game for the PSX by
porting an identical copy of their Extreme Pinball version for the PC over
to this platform. The result is four medium paced pinball tables that will
provide you with a challenge until better pinball games are released.

Four tables are found within Extreme Pinball: Urban Chaos, Monkey Mayhem,
Medieval Knights, and Rock Fantasy. Urban Chaos is a table that takes you
into the future as a cop to fight against crime. Cities are names after
their network addresses and the city of Televox 203 has become isolated
from other cities because of communication failures and infrastructure
decay. Your main goal will be to re-establish communication lines for the
city by reactivating the six SCPMON Network links. The links consist of
loops and isolated areas that will reactivate the links when the ball
passes through them. Once you accomplish that you'll be able to pick up
some high scores with a few multi-balls. In Monkey Mayhem you are
astronaut Binford T. Dremmel who unfortunately warped through a worm hole
and ended up in uncharted space. Running out of fuel you crash on a Monkey
planet and where you are taken prisoner by alien chimps. Your mission will
be to gather up six tools to help you survive and repair your ship so that
you may someday return to Earth. This is realized by many loops, tunnels,
monkey bars, and even a few friendly hamsters. Enter the kingdom of the
Medieval Knights and find yourself battling against trolls, dragons, bats,
and many deadly horrors of the dark castle. Your goal will be to reach the
throne room without being evicted into the death's dungeon and left to
die. Rock Fantasy will turn you into a manager for a group called the Rock
Makers. Your goal will be to assemble the lead signer, guitarist, bassist,
and drummer together so that yo can turn them into celebrities. If you
manage to succeed, a small screen on the table will display a short video
of the group performing on stage.

The music for each of the four tables sets the appropriate atmosphere for
each of their themes. Urban Chaos will take you into the future with
futuristic techno music and occasional police calls being made. Monkey
Mayhem has more drums, flutes and monkey sounds to carry you into the
jungle. Medieval Knights has synthesizer music that delivers a mysterious
feeling as you are taken back in time. Finally Rock Fantasy contains music
with guitars that resembles your average rock music that isn't heavy metal
and a voice that says "far out man" every once in awhile.

Two dimensional textured graphics is what you'll find within the game. The
graphics are well achieved and contain many details. So many details that
it may take a little time to get used to what you should be aiming for
within the game. At the bottom of your screen will be the scoreboard which
you'll be able to set to preferred on, off or automatic to have the most
important information displayed during the game. Not enough of the table
is shown all at once making the ball a little difficult to follow at
times. Most of the time, however, the ball won't be traveling that fast.
In fact, the ball seems to float instead of actually rolling on a table
which doesn't make it completely realistic. During the games, different
events will change your ball into a ring, bow tie, or simply change it's
color.

A screen saver that dims the graphics will be activated after 30 seconds
have passed since a game was placed on pause. After a full minute, the
screen will be dimmed again to a point where you can barely see what's on
the screen. This makes for an efficient screen saver, however if you just
walk away from a game that is currently in play without hitting pause, no
screen saver will ever be activated.

The game play is quite slow and becomes boring after some time. The games
seem to concentrate more on obtaining your objectives than just making
millions of points. It's important to know exactly what you should be
aiming for to obtain your goals in order to enjoy the game. Once you are
aware of them, the games will be more interesting and even frustrating if
you can't obtain what's required.

Each of the tables have long loading times. Once you select a table, it
can take up to two minutes to load the game. During this time an image
representing the table you are loading will be displayed. I found two
minutes to be quite a bit of time when games these days load more quickly.
Ten years ago I use to spend eight to ten minutes loading games on my
Atari 800XL from a cassette player which is obviously much slower than a
CD-ROM.

Your control pad will consist of left and right flippers with three
different nudge buttons. You'll be able to hit the machine to left, right,
or upwards. I found the different nudge buttons to be a good feature, however
it would have been nice if we could configure them. Unfortunately, there
are no options to do so and one is stuck with using the default control
pad setup. With the setup that is provided, it was a little too easy to
accidently tilt the machine and lose your ball.

Conclusion:

As you may have been able to tell, I didn't particularly enjoy Extreme
Pinball. It's fun and entertaining, but not at all as addicting as other
pinball games I have played and quickly becomes tiresome. I recommend you
try the game for yourself before spending your hard earned cash on it.